Childcare business owner admits to centre’s failings

A Sydney businessman whose childcare centre was shut down in May due to an “unacceptable risk to children” has admitted staff at his centre were hired without working with children checks and infants ate food scraps off the floor.

John Tanios made the admissions in an interview with this masthead and 60 Minutes, but also claimed he was unfairly targeted by the NSW childcare regulator.

“The allegations made were wrong, things were taken out of context and it was purely a witch-hunt,” Tanios said.

The Angel’s Paradise centre in Wagga Wagga operated from 2016 but never met national quality standards – instead it was consistently rated as “working towards” the second lowest ranking by the regulator.

The centre’s licence was suspended in September 2024 after a child fell and broke his collarbone a month earlier.

Tanios disputes the child was injured in his care and believes he deserves another chance. He has re-registered his business under a new name and plans to fight the government’s decision in court in September.

“The children were never at risk. There was never a safety concern for the children,” he said.

The NSW Department of Education made 23 findings against the centre, including “infants placed in high chairs as a form of behaviour management, infants eating food scraps off the floor and non-reporting of child protection concerns”.

Tanios denied children had been placed in high chairs as punishment but he did admit that children, at times, had eaten from the floor.

“It should never have happened, but it happened. It happened one time. It may have happened two times, three times, I don’t know, but it’s not something that’s common practice,” he said.

He also conceded staff were hired without working with children checks.

“That definitely did happen. I think it happened on two or three occasions. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Those staff, a couple of them, the applications were made, but we didn’t wait for the response to come in.”

Peter Davis’ son attended the centre before he pulled the toddler out after he came home with unexplained injuries and heavily soiled nappies.

He made a complaint to the department in 2023 but it took another year before a serious incident finally prompted action.

Felicity, who asked for her surname not to be used, was 17 when she started at Angel’s Paradise as an apprentice educator and was at the centre when the regulator would do spot checks and call in unannounced.

She said she would beg them to “please shut us down” and that “the look on their face was just disbelief, it was like, oh my goodness, this is actually like, worse than it actually looks”.

The whistleblower said that in one instance she was looking after 22 children despite being too young to have a working with children check and that as an apprentice she was never supposed to be left alone unsupervised with infants.

“I’d have to unfortunately leave some babies crying to get another baby, and I would just have crying babies around me. It was very overwhelming.”

Despite Tanios’ centre never meeting standards, up to 70 per cent of running costs were covered by government subsidies.

More than 35 childcare services across Australia face having their funding stripped if they do not meet national standards under new federal government powers passed to address a national childcare crisis involving substandard care, a shortage of workers and alleged abuse of children.

Rogue operators such as Tanios are in the sights of the government crackdown, federal Education Minister Jason Clare having warned childcare operators he’s “not mucking around”.

“If you don’t meet the standards, you don’t get the money,” Clare said. “That’s why I say money talks. And now the message is really clear. If you don’t meet the standards, you don’t get the funding. The centre doesn’t operate. You don’t make any profits.”

The government’s action comes after Joshua Brown, an educator who worked in more than 20 childcare centres in Victoria, was charged with 70 offences relating to alleged child abuse. Police claim Brown sexually abused eight toddlers and babies at the Creative Garden Early Learning Centre in Point Cook, Melbourne.

Legal action planned

Joanne, not her real name, is a parent of one of the alleged victims and says she is still coming to terms with what is alleged to have occurred.

“I honestly cannot get my head around the fact that you drop your child off in a place that you think is safe, that has all these rules and regulations to keep your children safe. And then this happens,” she said.

Creative Garden is one of more than 400 childcare centres owned by G8 Education, a corporate giant worth more than $700 million.

Jodie Harris, from Arnold Thomas and Becker Lawyers, is a lawyer representing some of the families of the alleged victims, is planning civil action against G8 Education.

She said Brown should have been on the regulator’s radar a long time ago after revelations he had been fired from two child care centres for unrelated reasons before his employment with Creative Garden in 2021.

She also says more action should have been taken over a complaint raised by a student educator about staffing ratios and safety of children at Creative Garden in 2022.

“As of 2023, Creative Garden was meeting standards – that’s somewhat extraordinary in circumstances when in August 2022, we have a report being made to the regulator about concerns about staffing levels, and that was not investigated,” Harris said. “The complaint wasn’t handled. The complaint was received by the department, but it was not acted upon.

In a statement, G8 Education said it was “committed to continuing to work with Victoria Police, the Victorian government and other authorities as part of their ongoing investigation and are doing everything we can to give them the best chance of achieving justice for the children and families involved”.

The Department of Education in Victoria said it could not comment on individual cases but the Victorian government was delivering a child safety overhaul and “taking immediate action to strengthen the working with children check and child safety in early childhood education and care settings with an initial $42 million boost to the sector”.

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Clare admitted it should never have come to this before governments stepped up to make long overdue reforms to better protect children.

“We’ve taken some action here to make our centres safer but not enough and not fast enough,” he said. “If I had a magic wand, everything that we’ve now announced would’ve happened 10 years ago.”

But Marianne Fenech, a professor in early childhood education at the University of Sydney, said while she welcomed action by the government, many of the changes were reactive.

She said a weak regulator and a sector dominated by for-profit companies was a recipe for disaster and what was really required was a radical rethink of how we care for young children.

“We need to better use the money that governments are already putting into the system by investing more in public provision and not-for-profit services,” Fenech said.

‘I will fight to get justice for Arianna’

Stronger regulation of commercial childcare operators is something Jozef Maragol and his wife, Anet, have spent the past seven years advocating.

In August 2018, their 16-month-old daughter, Arianna, never woke up from her morning sleep at the Berry Patch childcare centre in Sydney’s north-west.

“A doctor came and he said to us, ‘I’m sorry – Arianna passed away.’ And I had to scream. How I could leave her by herself. I was not there for her,” Anet said.

An autopsy found Arianna’s cause of death was inconclusive but her grief-stricken parents blame the centre for not physically checking on the toddler for three hours, instead relying on CCTV to monitor her.

The Berry Patch was meeting national standards at the time of Arianna’s death, despite an inspector warning four years earlier that educators were relying on security cameras for sleep checks.

A year after the toddler’s death, the centre was promoted to “exceeding” national quality standards despite its own investigation into the circumstances of what happened not being finalised.

“This is not a childcare system. It’s a risk-taking system that when you drop your kids, you don’t know what’s happening there,” Jozef said.

The Maragols are hoping a coronial inquest into their daughter’s death will give them the answers they desperately need but won’t stop fighting for reforms.

“As long as I breathe, I will fight to get justice for Arianna,” Jozef said.

In a statement, the NSW Education Department and the Berry Patch said they were supportive of an inquest into Arianna’s death.

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